I never played around with Google Earth for long and did not follow the news that closely. Maybe that is why I never heard about the flight simulator that is build into Google Earth. I read about it today in a computer magazine and thought it would be cool enough to post it along to all those other unknowing ones.

I knew we were going to see more PC and Wiimote mashups this year. After being able to play several shooters on the pc with the remote it was only a matter of time until someone would introduce applications or even a complete user interface utilizing the Wiimote.

I’m writing this article rather excited because of what I have just seen. Panoramic photos recently started to be very popular when the first algorithms and applications for creating such images appeared and digital cameras were given support for this specific kind of shooting. Publishing such shots on Flickr or any other similar site sure is fine but I’ve just hit a service that serves panoramic photos in a breath-taking way.

In a place far away from reality – which happens to be somewhere near Seattle – two Star Wars geeks decided to create the ultimate home theater: A Star Wars Death Star Home Theater. It took them 36 months to complete the project which in my opinion resembles the interior of an Imperial Star Destroyer and not the Death Star.

I am a big fan of flying and everything related to it and I’m excited about the job of all air traffic controllers. Among excellent knowledge of English language, this kind of work requires perfect concentration on anything that the controller does or says.

There are many stations on the internet that let you listen to voice navigation from different airports around the world almost in real-time, with just a small delay. However, at least one of these sites stands out of the crowd by providing a real-time visual summary of current situation in the air above the Atlanta airport, along with controller’s speech.

For people who enjoyed Team Fortress Classic and maybe even still play it, there is a new multi-player modification out for Half Life 2 called Fortress Forever.

It has been a long time ago that I was addicted to a multiplayer shooter. The game back then was Unreal Tournament and I have yet to witness a game as addictive, as fun and exciting as the original UT 99. Team Fortress 2 could be that game judging from the trailers, class videos and gameplay movies that I have seen so far.

I’m one of those who always wants to find the perfect gift for people that I care about which usually takes some time to think about. My usual approach is that I listen carefully and make mental notes whenever I hear something, a desire or wish, that makes the perfect gift.

Democracy at it’s finest I would say. The project My Football Club has the goal to raise enough money to buy a real world football club in the United Kingdom. Every member pays an annual fee of £35 which in turn gives him an equal share in the football club. All important management decisions such as buying and scouting new players and team selection are democratically decided by counting all member votes with each member having exactly one vote.

Google Earth is a interesting application not only for geographers but also for everyone else who is interested in the earth. All the addons that are available for it make it a great experience to learn more about the earth. The sky is the limit, that’s what Google probably thought when they decided to add the Sky – that’s the blue thingy above your head with all the shiny stars – to Google Earth.

P5chin who is a regular reader of my blog send me a tip which I immediately had to write about. I don’t know a single computer user who is not unhappy with all the cables, power sources and external devices cluttering the place on and beneath the desk.

Windows 7, the new Microsoft operating system, is still at least three years away but that fact did not seem to bother Deviant Art member Long Z who created an unofficial but great looking Windows 7 wallpaper. Windows 7, which was codenamed Vienna before, is just another codename of course and we will most likely experience another name change in the future.

World Display is a free wallpaper locater and changer for Microsoft Windows that offers several ways to find wallpapers. The main feature of World Display is to display beautiful locations of the world as your background in Windows. You can use the build in Google Maps tool to browse to interesting locations, preview the images available and add the location to your selection or the preview image to your favorites.

It has been a long time since I mentioned the last website that offered hundreds of wallpapers in various resolutions and I thought it would be nice to add another great site to the list. Wallpaperstock is a website with a large variety of wallpapers that are offered in several resolutions and categories.

There are currently two methods to provide Internet TV to the Internet community. The first is to offer channels and shows from one country through (mostly) Asian Internet tv clients such as TVU Player or Sopcast which has the advantage that you get to see live footage of sports events for instance.

I sparsely enjoy screensavers on my computer because I tend to prefer to turn of the monitor if I take a longer break. Another reason is that I did not find a good looking lightweight screensaver that I could install on my desktop pc. That is, until I read about Flurry in the excellent Donation Coder forum.

Ok. I have seen lots of movie promotions but this one is topping them all. Remember the Simpsons tv series ? The Kwik-E-Mart were Apu is pressing money out of Homer and his friends ? Well, they apparently created several of those across the United States to promote the new Simpson movie.

I’m normally that fond of using fans in the summer because most of them are just to loud which makes it problematic to work in the same room with them. There is however a fan that I found at Think Geek which connects Art and Fan into a LED Art Fan.

The LED Art Fan has 42 Leds build into the Fan which can hold up to 128 frames with a maximum capacity of 5 Megabyte. It is for instance possible to use animated gifs that will be shown during rotation or create your own animations or still images. This is great for publicity as well, can’t think of something cooler than such a fan that is displaying a company logo during a fare.

It becomes more common to use two monitors at once to increase productivity. Several of my friends already have two monitors setup as dual monitors to be able to display twice the amount of information on the screen. This makes perfect sense for users who do need a lot of information on the screen at once.

I know some Poker players for instance who use two monitors to play eight games at once. It is actually pretty hard to find wallpapers for dual monitor setups. Sure, you could merge two wallpapers and use them as the background but it is also possible to use dual screen wallpapers from the site that I just found.

My immediate reaction to the Epoq MP4 wrist watch was that I thought that it was a really cool idea. I was not able to come up with a lot of applications for it but it looked really cool. The watch acts as a standard music and video player supporting formats such as mp3, wma and mp4.

Pictures can be viewed as well and everything can be uploaded using a normal USB 2.0 port. The mp4 wrist watch comes with different storage capacities, the largest being 2 Gigabytes of space which should be enough for lots of videos in that resolution. There is also the option to choose a widescreen lcd display instead of a normal one.

A word of caution before I start the article. If you are easily offended by strong language or a minor you should stop reading right now and read some other articles on my site. No Good TV is a Internet TV portal that looks and feels a lot like the Joost or Bablegum with the difference that No Good TV is a web application.

All you need is your browser to view the shows. The layout of the site is rather chaotic and it takes a while to get used to it – well, unless you like to watch MTV a lot. It really reminds me of the shows that are shown on MTV all the time these days. You can select to view various channels such as Down and Dirty, Dirty Music Videos or Reel Junkies.

It seems that you only need a crazy idea, record everything on video and upload it to Youtube to become famous. Five friends from France decided to record their (successful) attempts of throwing empty cans into trashbins and upload this video to Youtube.

They released two videos on Youtube. Their second one received more than 1.500.000 million views which is pretty impressive. I think one reason for the success of the two movies are that it everyone is able to try it by himself and see how difficulty it is to aim and throw the can to hit the trashbin. The videos are well done and enjoyable, have fun watching them..

Seadragon and Photosynth are two new technologies that have been presented at the TED 2007 conference by it’s architect Blaise Aguera y Arcas. Seadragon is basically a way to navigate seamlessly through a very large amount of image data. He was giving three examples at the presentation.

First he introduced a 300 Megapixel image, then that he was able to zoom into a complete book and lastly that it was possible to create new types of ads that would allow to zoom in and reveal details that would not be possible otherwise.

I’m normally not that easily fascinated by art, especially be the form of art found on the Internet. This art project however caught me by surprise. I found reference to the picture on Digg where it was advertised as “The Most Awesome Pic EVER”. My first thought was of course that someone was again using the term awesome to draw attention to his article. This might have worked for the first post on Digg with the term awesome in it but Digg is flooded with it nowadays.

The sites Torrentfreak and Beautiful Crime announced an Anti-DRM T-Shirt competition a while ago and all entries to the competition have been posted on the Torrentfreak website. All 46 T-Shirt designs can be seen and everyone may vote for their favorite T-Shirt design. Who would have thought that this competition would get such a large amount of entrants ?

You can find some really clever designs among the 46 and I would like to display the five designs that I liked the most here at Ghacks. Just head over to the Torrentfreak website to take a look at all of the designs. The winning design will receive a price of $250, the second one of $100 and the third a price of $50.

Desktop Nexus is a site with a wide variety of high resolution and widescreen wallpapers. The wallpapers are divided into popular categories such as Entertainment, Video Games and Cars. Each category displays the most popular, the newest and a selection of random wallpapers from that category next to a tag cloud and sub categories that define the selection even further.

One main feature of Desktop Nexus is that wallpapers are available in a lot of different formats that suit full screen and widescreen monitors. Resolutions start at 800×600 for full screen monitors and end at 1600×1200 there. The widescreen wallpapers start at 1280×800 and 2560×1600.

If you are looking for a new site that offers a lot of high resolution wallpapers you should take a look at the web album that is offered on the No Pixel website. Resolutions go up to 1900×1200 with a lot of widescreen wallpapers in the resolution 1680×1050. The majority is showing natural images like landscapes, plants, animals and buildings.

One nice feature is the slideshow. If you move your mouse over the current image three buttons are shown on the top of it. The play button starts the slideshow which is loading one image after the other while the other two buttons are for manually navigating the pictures.

A collection of the best photos published on Flickr in 2006 with an option to vote for all of them in a voting process that reminds me of those hot or not type of sites.

Your first option is to take a look at how the photos have been rated by other users. Please be aware that all of the photos on the site are the best of 2006 and that the rating on this external site is only a rating of good photos. It can happen that a photo gets only 1 point which means that is is bad considered to a photo with a higher rating but still great if you consider all photos on Flickr for this year.

I’m not watching a lot of TV. Just about two hours in a week which is reduced to about zero when the football season ends. I do have to watch sometimes though when my girlfriend wants to watch a show or something and I happened to see an advertisement recently that I liked.

Most advertisements are just annoying and crappy but this one was different. It was for a chocolate snack called Kinder Bueno and the ad used a technique that blended a real actor – Collien Fernandes – into a cartoon. What really caught my attention was not the actress but the song of the ad.

If you are looking for a rather unique screensaver for Windows 2000, XP or Windows Vista you should take a look at Flitter which is a mashup from Flickr and Twitter at the moment. What it does is that it is retrieving realtime data from both Flickr and Twitter to display those when the screensaver is active.

You obviously need a computer that is connected to the Internet to use this screensaver but it is very well worth it. The default setting for the screensaver pulls data from the public timelines of both Flickr and Twitter but you have the possibility to custom this further.

I’m always looking for new free softwares out there and although I already found an automatic wallpaper changer called Wallpaper Juggler I decided to give the wallpaper changer ScrollWall a try. It is always good to be able to choose from more than one program that has a similar functionality.

ScrollWall offers a very clean interface with only a few options to choose from. You can choose if you want to stretch, center or tile wallpapers that do not fit your resolution and select the frequency of the change.

Here is something that I found on Youtube and thought that it looked incredibly entertaining. We all know the drill that we are forced to watch dozens of advertisements in cinemas before the movies start which becomes increasingly boring if you go to the cinemas regularly. The title of the video is Human Joysticks (NewsBreaker Live interactive cinema game) which describes exactly what this is all about. Take some motion sensing cameras, a breakout video game, a big screen and an enthusiastic crowd and you are about to witness the funniest breakout game of all times.

I think it is really fascinating that Coca Cola is doing another major promotion in Europe teaming up once again with iTunes and giving away 2 billion songs on iTunes along with other goodies such as tickets to concerts and iPods for codes that can be found in Coca Cola bottles. You had to use four codes to be able to download one song from iTunes in the last promotion and the new one will surely use the system as well. It should be noted that only selected songs could be downloaded in the last promotion.

When I first saw the Vpod.tv homepage I thought I was seeing a Joost light version on the web. A fullscreen video of the infamous nunchuck guy was shown followed by several others. A menu would appear when I moved the mouse cursor over the lower region of the website showing the next videos on line and giving me some options to switch channels, skip videos and to open a secondary menu with more options.

I always wanted to have one of those lightsabers since the first time that I was watching Star Wars back then when the first movie came out. We used all sorts of replacements like flashlights, sticks and swords to play Star Wars as kids, the rest was done by our imagination. Using those replacements did not make a big difference for us kids but it surely would feel awkward to do this as an adult.

The Stardoll is definitely a great playground for children between the age of 7 and 16 but also suitable for everyone else who likes to dress and play around with paper dolls. The site offers two main areas. The first can be accessed without registering to Stardollls. You can pick a celebrity, e.g. Johnny Depp, Kylie Minogue or Heidi Klum and use a wardrobe to to outfit them. If you take Johnny you could dress him with the same clothes that he was wearing in The Pirates of the Caribbean or with a multitude of other clothes.

I thought it would be really nice if I would learn a little bit more about you, my regular and casual readers. Instead of simply asking for introductions I had the idea to ask a weekly question which I would answer as well. I certainly know the demographics by taking a look at my site stats but that is not what I’m interested in.

The feature to add your own visual styles to Windows XP is locked by default and you need to replace the original uxtheme.dll with a patched unlocked one to be able to add visual styles to the operating system. Download the patched uxtheme.dll from Softpedia and do the following. Rename the original file which can be found in the system32 folder of your Windows XP installation to uxtheme.dll.old and move the downloaded version into system32. You will have to restart your computer afterwards before the changes are recognized.

If you thought that you would be starring at those boring LCD or Plasma displays for the next ten years you will now be proven wrong. Some displays look incredible cool. I personally would love to lay my hands on the Samsung 12mm thick LCD display, the Toshiba Interactive 3D Display and the Touchless Touchscreen. I decided to only include my favorites from the ten future display technologies and suggest that you head out to the original website who posted the list to see the others.

The world’s best Usenet provider Giganews has managed it once again to set another milestone by creating a software called Giganews Accelerator which uses header download compression to download the headers of the newsgroup up to 10 times faster. Header downloads are the most annoying part when it comes to using the Usenet. It sometimes takes longer to download the headers of a popular newsgroup than to download a 700 Megabytes file with my 16 Mbit connection.

I’m usually not using iTunes at all because I think the software slow and overloaded like the Windows Media Player. If I want to play music I use Winamp and to transfer songs to and from my iPod I use Floola. I still have iTunes installed but as I said it is only used very seldom. To be honest, I did not even knew that there were visualizations for iTunes available. You can think of them like the ones on Winamp for instance. I found this amazing visualization for iTunes and decided to write an article about it. I think it would be best to walk you through the installation and activation although it is nothing complicated. Download and install Magnetosphere and start iTunes afterwards.

If you thought that Androids are a product of the not so near future you thought wrong. What you witnessed in movies like I-Robot, Star Wars and Star Trek is becoming more and more reality in todays live. Yes that is right: today. Scientists still have to take care of many elements like movement and artificial intelligence to create the next C3PO but they are definitely on the right track if you can’t distinguish between Androids and humans anymore in pictures, movies and even reality.

Did you know that you could get into really big trouble if you post the code 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 on your website ? It is very likely that a takedown notice will be send to the owner of the website as soon as the RIAA, the AACS or some of their lawyers find your website. You might be wondering why they are making such a big deal about this code which only some users might identify as the code to rule them all.. aka the processing key that unlocks the content of every HD-DVD available up to this point.

Audiobooks become increasingly popular and there are many pay sites that offer downloads of Audiobooks after you paid for them. It is however possible to download free Audiobooks from various sites from the Internet. The main problem with finding those free sites is that many pay sites offer free samples of the Audiobooks as well but you have to pay when you want to listen to the complete book.

I have seen lots of weird gadgets in the past but this one tops them all. A house that can be rotated by 360° around a central core that contains all the plumbing and connections to the house ? Sounds a little bit futuristic don’t you think ? You could apparently rotate the house in correlation with the moving sun for instance. It is also nice to get a fresh view out of the window by simply rotating the house a little bit. Take a look at the pictures..

Kids, let that be a lesson to all of you who are thinking about doing the same thing. A 20 year old unemployed man named Ryan Fitzgerald who is still living with his father had some time at his disposal and decided to help people who needed to talk to someone by publishing his phone number on the popular video portal Youtube. He received more than 5000 calls and text messages after uploading his video on Friday saying that he would be there for everyone who wanted to contact him.

If you thought that the last Multi-touch technology videos that I have been showing here at Ghacks have been cool then you should see this one. This one is a presentation by Jeff Han who is a research scientist for NYU’s Media Research Lab during TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) 2006. Jeff Han describes his technique the following way: “Our technique is force-sensitive, and provides unprecedented resolution and scalability, allowing us to create sophisticated multi-point widgets for applications large enough to accommodate both hands and multiple users.”

I still believe that Starcraft is the best real-time strategy game that was ever produced and hope that Blizzard will one day create a second part of at least a MMORPG out of it. Starcraft is part of my past, I used to meet with friends back then and play it in local lan games all night long. It was perfectly balanced and much better than Command and Conquer in my opinion. Someone – I suppose another fan – has created an unbelievable amount of Starcraft Origami and uploaded pictures of them to Flickr.

While there is no shortage of sites that offer mp3 downloads, both legal and illegal, the concept of a site for legitimate free mp3 downloads that is completely supported by ads remains elusive. The latest site to take a stab at making this model work is We7, a new site with a prominent backer in the form of no other than Peter Gabriel.

Currently the site is still in the early stages and the range of (DRM-free) mp3s available for download is still quite small (I counted 8 artists and 19 tracks, but I guess you have to start somewhere).

I was very young when the first three Star Wars movies made their appearance in the cinemas of this world but was fascinated by the movies since then. This changed a little bit with the release of the last three movies which were a total disappointment in my opinion. Nevertheless I like Star Wars and everything that surrounds it. I’m not a die hard fan but someone who can watch the movies over and over again without getting bored.